The Avesta, Volume 21, Number 2, Summer, 1942 Page: 17
36 p. : ill. ; 30 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The spring of 1905 heralded their second year in
Texas, and their first born, Jefferson Davis Lynch,
came into the world. John's best saddle horse was blow-
ing in a frothy lather when he dashed in with the doc-
tor, after a nearly killing twenty-mile ride in the night.
As each year passed, the land seemed to get more
dusty and the drouths more frequent. The four big
tanks on the ranch would dry up, and Sarah noticed
that it hurt John down deep to watch his sheep and
cows die bogged in the mud of the dried-up earthtanks.
And as the years dropped away, Sarah had more chil-
dren and became hardy and stout like all range women.
"Honey, we can't help but make a good spring shear-
ing," he systematically told Sarah each year. And each
year the drouth would sweep across the plains and kill
hundreds of his sheep; or, if it wasn't the drouth, it
would be a devastating cloudburst that would drown
nearly a fourth of his flock.
Sarah marveled at gaunt, range-toughened, leathery-
faced John Lynch; he never seemed to give up. By then,
little Jeff had grown to be a rangy, sturdy lad of eight
years, and John boasted to his wife that their oldest son
was going to become a real stockman.
"The West is in his blood, Sarah. The West gets into
everyone's blood."
He told that to her innumerable times. She never
seemed to grasp that magnetic feeling the West had for
her husband. To him the ranch was nearly a green val-
ley of paradise at times. Those were the times he would
ride to the top of Queen Mountain at dusk and watch
the blue-purplish haze settling over the pastures and the
rainbow colors filtering through the thin soft clouds as
the fiery-red sun would sink in the west. And some-
times at night he would help watch over the sheep when
coyotes were on the loose, and there would be something
about the quietness and the vastness of the moon-bathedland that would take hold of
the transformation f r o m
night to day and the pale,
soft-blue colorless color that
made the harsh, hot summer
sweltering glare of the day-
time. At night, the ribbed
plateaus looked soft-con-
toured like delicately mould-
ed new putty.
Their family had grown
to six children, four boys
and two girls. As the girls
grew up in the following
ears, Sarah would occasion-
ally oven the battered trunk
and bring out the beautiful
clothes she had brought to,
Texas a decade before. Thev
became the only tie-in with
the past. During the firsthim. It might have been
three or four years in the wild, unsettled country, Sar-
ah used to get homesick for Virginia, but as the years
went by she accepted the life of the West and never
mentioned to John that she was lonely for her early
life. As she taught the two girls to sew, she showed
quiet, lady-like Martha and tomboy Wilma her beau-
tiful party dresses of fifteen years before, and she told
them about her own girlhood.
One year, just about the time of the first World War,
John Lynch had Lady Luck riding with him, and with
the increase in the wool market, made a good year with
his wool crop. It seemed to rejuvenate him somewhat,
for he had taken to drinking at night when he came in
from the range, and silver hairs were speckling his
thick black hair.
"I told you we would make this pay," he told Sar-
ah, and she smiled when she saw the youth come back
into his eyes.
But as the years passed by, she couldn't help think-
ing that they were wearing themselves out for nothing.
Jeff had reached manhood and was getting restless. He
was going to see Christene North, daughter of one of
the neighboring ranchers, pretty regularly. John Lynch
could see that the boy was becoming dissatisfied and
wanting to get out on his own so he could get married,
so John told him if he'd work hard the next year, he
could cut himself a little spread of sheep out of the
main bunch and have a piece of land off in the south-
east corner of the ranch.
Nineteen twenty-five brought big oilmen to the West.
John and Sarah Lynch awoke to find they were sitting
on land that was just a crust over a fabulous pool of
black gold.
Ranching was forgotten in the mad push for oil-
well drilling. Locations sprang up over night all over
the land, and geologists informed John Lynch that one
of the world's largest reservoirs of shallow oil lay be-
neath the scrubby sections of
his rangeland.
"Maybe it came a little
different than I'd counted on,
but we finally made the
grade," John told his fami-
ly. "Why, they're naming
the new town that's spring-
ing up on the railroad after
me. They're calling it Johns-
town."
Three years passed, and
John Lynch lost track of his
mounting bank a c c o u n t.
Among his children, Jeff,
James, Bob, Alfred, Wilma,
and Martha, he distributed
his land and fortune into a
seven-way cut, keeping only
(Continued on page 35)17
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North Texas State Teachers College. The Avesta, Volume 21, Number 2, Summer, 1942, periodical, Summer 1942; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2105649/m1/19/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.